Opposition Ex-Communist Favored in Croatia Vote

By STEVEN ERLANGER

Published: January 1, 2000

ZAGREB, Croatia—
Ivica Racan, a 55-year-old ex-Communist with a beard and a taste for rock music, is likely to be Croatia's next prime minister if the polls hold and an opposition coalition wins parliamentary elections on Jan. 3.

And if the opposition does win, defeating the governing Croatian Democratic Union founded by Franjo Tudjman, the late president, Mr. Racan says he will move to cut spending on social services by 17 percent. Such a cut will not be very popular or seem very socialist, he acknowledged in an interview, but economic restructuring is something a desperate Croatia desperately needs.

Mr. Racan also promises an opposition government will cooperate better with the tribunal in The Hague investigating war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, although he has his doubts about its fairness toward Croatia. He defends the Croatian military action in 1995 that expelled nearly 200,000 Croatian Serbs.

But some in the government ''thought they had to cover up war crimes so there would be no mud on our common fight for an independent Croatia,'' he said, and that fight is won. ''Certain crimes are not defensible, and we have to prosecute them and preserve the value of our common struggle.''

Mr. Racan also pledges to meddle less in Bosnia than the Tudjman government, which formally supported the Bosnian Federation of Muslims and Croats but in fact worked to undermine it and preserve a separate Bosnian Croat entity.

The opposition wants a more powerful parliament and a less powerful presidency, Mr. Racan says, a fairer justice system and more open access to state television, which currently operates as a private transmission belt for the governing party, which has run Croatia since independence in 1991. Creating a truly public television service, Mr. Racan said, is the coalition's first task.

''But it is much easier to talk about democracy when you're in opposition than when you're in power,'' Mr. Racan said disarmingly, looking toward his wife, Dijana Plestina, a professor of political science at Wooster College in Ohio.

Despite his opposition to Mr. Tudjman, who died on Dec. 11, Mr. Racan is respected here because of the way he behaved as the last leader of the Croatian Communist Party. Many believe that he could have cracked down on dissent in 1989-90; instead in 1990, he threw his support behind Croatia's first multiparty elections, which led to the sweeping victory of Mr. Tudjman and his party.

At that time, many Croatian Serbs voted for Mr. Racan and his party as emblematic of the more multiethnic ideals of Yugoslavia. But today, wary of offending the strong nationalist strain in the Croatian electorate, Mr. Racan is very careful about criticizing the government's languid efforts to allow Croatian Serbs to return to Croatia, as they are supposed to be able to do under the 1995 Dayton accords that ended the Bosnian war.

''We can't be completely dissatisfied with the return of refugees to Croatia,'' Mr. Racan said carefully, while adding that real progress in resettling Croatian Serbs must be ''connected to the rest of the Balkans,'' meaning Bosnia and Belgrade.

But he acknowledged the ''process has to be faster'' in every direction, with Bosnian Croats able to return to Bosnia as well as Croatian Serbs able to return here. Despite the risk of inflaming nationalists, ''I don't insist on complete reciprocity,'' he said, but added, ''In this part of Europe, where there has been so much human suffering and destruction, it's not easy to defend my principles.''

Opinion polls show that the parties of Mr. Racan and his coalition partner, Drazen Budisa, together with another allied four-party opposition coalition, will take a majority of the seats in parliament, although the governing party will remain the largest single party. The long-governing Croatian Democratic Union is being helped by the aura of Mr. Tudjman, whose beaming face as he hugs a child is featured on its billboards.

Dividing the spoils among six parties will be difficult.

Mr. Budisa, 51 and a former dissident, is expected to be the main opposition candidate in presidential elections on Jan. 24. Mate Granic, the moderate foreign minister, wants to be president, but the governing party is having trouble agreeing to his candidacy. The party has a strongly nationalist wing, and powerful players like the deputy speaker of Parliament, Vladimir Seks, and Ivic Pasalic, the former Tudjman internal security adviser, are afraid where Mr. Granic may take the party, even if he wins.

So Mr. Granic is being tempted to run as an independent, officials say, where he would confront a number of other candidates and hope to make it into a second-round runoff between the two top finishers. To become president, a candidate must win more than 50 percent of the vote.

Croatia's big economic problems -- a large budget deficit, national debt, high unemployment, corruption and an aging population (a fifth of the country is supposed to receive a pension) -- will be a kind of poison pill for any new government.

But Mr. Racan says the right words, as he hopes for Western support in any coming restructuring.

''We must stop Croatia's fall into deeper and deeper economic crisis,'' he said, proposing a radical cut in social spending and the high rate of taxation, and a strong effort to privatize state enterprises and banks, trying to attract foreign investment.

A common enough platform, but difficult here, where most state enterprises and banks have been run for the benefit of the governing party or its allies, and where privatization has been murky and corrupt, Western diplomats say, with the state bailing out the problem companies of its friends.

Photo: Ivica Racan, the leader of the opposition coalition in Croatia. (Associated Press)